In a conventional magnetic media drive, a continuous film of magnetic material is typically used to store bits of data. Each bit is traditionally defined on the magnetic material through the action of a write head of the media drive. Thus, the locations of the bits of the media drive were traditionally defined by the action of the write head itself and not by the magnetic media on which the bits were written.
In order to increase the amount of bits that may be stored on traditional magnetic media, techniques were developed to decrease the amount of space consumed by each of the bits on the magnetic media. Thus, the amount of bits that could be stored on a given area of the traditional magnetic media increased as the amount of space consumed by each of the bits decreased. However, reliability of the bits to persist data may also decrease as the amount of space consumed by each of the bits decreases. For example, heat may cause bits to change a magnetic orientation when the amount of magnetic material used to store each of the bits becomes sufficiently small. Consequently, storage of data using these bits may become unreliable.
Accordingly, bit patterned magnetic media has been developed. Bit patterned magnetic media may physically isolate magnetic material that is used to store the bits as separate islands. This isolation helps retain magnetic orientation of the bits and therefore increases the reliability of data storage. However, conventional techniques that are used to write to and read from bit patterned magnetic media may cause data errors.